


This Is You, Going Into Me, Saving My Life

by RoryKurago



Category: Second Chance - Fandom
Genre: Dubious Science, F/M, Oral Sex, Wall Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-23
Updated: 2016-01-23
Packaged: 2018-05-15 17:55:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5794183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here is Mary with her back to the wall, and her leg over Pritchard's shoulder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Is You, Going Into Me, Saving My Life

**Author's Note:**

> I'm going to regret this in the morning. And possibly after watching episode 2.

Mary isn’t sure where this started.

Somewhere between Day 35 and Day 90, setting aside the moment he laid a hand to her throat. (Didn't she vow in her first year of university that as an adult, now, she would never let another person hold that much control over her? The twins loved their father - he let Mary protect them both without insisting Otto protect himself - but he couldn’t be everywhere at once. Mary became accustomed to defending herself. Otto and herself.)

So: Pritchard’s hand to her throat. That does not happen.

Somewhere along the way, Mary touches Pritchard’s arm. She coaxed him through remembering, didn't she? Weathered his anger, and the fear beneath it. This is a combination she’s familiar with, and she knows its edges and curves.

Pritchard pinching off the transfusion tube: that happens.

Mary looks him over, thoroughly, cautiously (the curve of the tube converted to the edge of a kink). Assessing what power means to him, how he gets it, and what it means to have power over _him_. And then she gives him his rope.

Somewhere along the way, he looks at her like more than a pretty face with a brilliant mind, more than a cancer patient. She is not a translator, a buffer, a boss, a sister, a helpmeet. She is a force to be reckoned with. Only when he stops and looks at her - really looks - does he feel the rope she lets him reel out tighten around his neck.

So here they are, beside the tank, preparing Pritchard for another swim in the maintenance fluid. Here is Pritchard taking off his shirt. Mary, examining his knuckles, neck, shoulders. Purely clinically, of course; Pritchard punched through a window on his first day and fell two stories. He is not a gentle man; not on his body, or architecture, or people. But he is a survivor.

Her fingers trail over his wrist. Pritchard catches them.

There should be a scar there, he tells her. From the War. Nothing serious, just enough to get the girls sympathetic; but the shadow’s back in his eyes and she wonders how much he remembers. She doesn't pity him. But she respects survivors.

It’s repellent to her, how quickly he runs to alcohol and women when his son rebuffs him. How little pain he seems to feel from all the heightened stimuli. But here is Mary with her back to the wall, and her leg over Pritchard’s shoulder. Her skirt pushed up around her hips.

She is repellent to him, she feels, in her refusal to put his family before his health. (" _Go save your son--and then come back here_.") Perhaps this is a holdover from being seventy-five and barely having a family at all. More: he seems to favour blondes.

Yet here is Pritchard, refusing to go to his knees even when it would be easier on them both, because he can’t--won’t. Gripping her thigh so tightly she’d almost believe, if he were a poetic man instead of a cynical one, that he considers her the first person to truly offer him a second chance since it all went sour. So, no: he will not go to his knees again.

Here is Mary’s hand, on Pritchard’s neck like a leash.

Here is Otto, watching from the doorway with an expression of dawning horror.

Mary opens her eyes and stares directly at him, her mouth open in a moan. She senses him like a second heartbeat. Feels her skin heat up in response.

Maybe she wills him away. Maybe she doesn’t.

He doesn’t move from the doorway.

Here is Mary's free hand finding the top of a display screen when Pritchard's tongue finds the sweet spot, and automatically holding back from pulling it off the wall; she needs something to hold on to but she can’t switch off the learning that holds her back from being destructive.

Their co-opting of Pritchard is a rebirth, not a re-writing. She tells herself this as she lets go of the screen to grip Pritchard's hair.

Destructive, Otto's face says. His tablet hangs limp at his side.

But there are things Otto needs to learn. Alexa is right: he needs to start getting ready. The world is about to change.

Crying her release, she yanks Pritchard’s hair hard enough that he snarls. He would, she’s sure, be grumbling about balding and roots if he didn’t have her up the wall on his shoulders with his face between her legs like he hadn't lived until today.

This is you, she told him as she sat by a pool that rippled in chilly winds, going into me. Saving my life.


End file.
